Too many talks to remember…

Difficulty level:★ ★ ★

It has been a hectic but successful day, with 12 hours of cycling around Brisbane and attending talks! I started with a part-drive, part-cycle to Southbank, navigating the rain, to watch two documentaries screened for the World Science Festival. “Mapping the Future: The Power of Algorithms” was an interesting discussion of what “predictive analytics” based on “big data” can foretell of human behaviour. “The Joy of Logic” was too introductory for me, but I was interested in the quirky anecdotes about the Vienna Circle of philosophers.

Next I cycled to the University of Queensland to hear Scott Stephens, editor of the (Australian) ABC’s Religion and Ethics website, on “To See or Not to See: Recovering Moral Vision in a Media Saturated Age”. He was critical of the pettiness of media in a democratic society, citing causes including commercialisation of news, the Watergate scandal, and the media’s change from reporting on politics to deliberately influencing it. Also the rise of social media means news organisations pander to popular taste and attempting to “go viral”. I was reminded of Alain de Botton’s commentary and alternative news experiment.

Immediately afterwards I rushed off to a presentation by George Musser, an editor at Scientific American. Researchers feel popular science reporting at this level and below can be too “dumbed-down” and/or sensationalist. Musser tried to unify the roles of “scientist” and “journalist”: science is his original background, but he also defended a journalist perspective to his audience. He said hot topics include cosmology, anything with “quantum” in the title, mind/consciousness, and others (I can certainly see these emphases in the science festival). But trends change — dinosaurs used to be popular, as was water on Mars but people are sick of hearing about that.

The next talk would be a personal highlight. But first I’ll mention for completeness that last night I attended “The first scientists: Aboriginal science in Queensland” panel discussion. The room was completely packed, the most full for the science festival so far, apparently. There were interesting tidbits such as some man in remote northern Queensland who lost part of a finger to a crocodile, then wrapped it in a local bark, a natural anaesthetic; I would have preferred more concrete examples like this.